Kate Winslet in Vanity Fair

She is famously deprecating about her looks and claims to be a normal mother-of-two with bad skin and cellulite, but Kate Winslet's latest photoshoot rather suggests otherwise.

By Anita Singh, Showbusiness Editor

11:07PM GMT 03 Nov 2008

The 33-year-old British actress has posed for one of her most glamorous sets of pictures yet in the new issue of Vanity Fair magazine, showing off a flawless complexion and enviably svelte figure. The images are a tribute to Catherine Deneuve in the 1967 film Belle de Jour.

Best foot forward: Kate Winslet in Deneuve tribute

In the accompanying interview, Winslet says she realises that the pictures will raise eyebrows among other mothers on the school run.

The mother of two children, Mia, eight, and Joe, five, said: "I know when I walk into that classrom in the morning, even if it's for a split second, at some point I'm being checked out. Some of them will even say to me, 'OK, what's the secret with the skin?' At which point I'm like, 'Oh my God, there's no secret. I have make-up on. And by the way, since I turned 30 I've had an acne problem on my chin. I'm just like everybody else - I just know how to cover it. If you'd like me to show you how, I'd be more than happy."

However, a spokesman for Vanity Fair admitted there had been "a minimal amount of retouching".

But her publicist said that while there had been some skin tone correction, her body had "not been airbrushed at all".

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Digital retouching expert Joanne Craske said: "The first place to look is under the eyes, because whether you're two or 92 you have darkness there, and the pictures of Kate have none. There's certainly no sign of acne either.

"It definitely looks like there has been a bit of work done."

Winslet famously objected when GQ magazine airbrushed away her curves and elongated her legs for a 2003 cover shoot. "I don't look like that and I don't desire to look like that," she said at the time. "It wasn't that they simply retouched my image - they completely stretched it so I looked like I was six feet tall and a size two."

At school, Winslet was bullied for being overweight and nicknamed 'Blubber'. She told Vanity Fair: "I never had huge ambitions - never. I was fat. I didn't know any fat famous actresses. I just did not see myself in that world at all, and I'm being very sincere. You know, once a fat kid, always a fat kid. Because you always think that you just look a little bit wrong or a little bit different from everyone else. And I still sort of have that."

Winslet stars in two forthcoming films which are already being talked of as Oscar contenders: Revolutionary Road, a 1950s drama which reunites her with Titanic co-star Leonardo DiCaprio, and The Reader, in which she plays a German woman exposed as a former Nazi.

She holds the record as the youngest actress ever to earn five Oscar nominations and makes no bones about how desperately she wants to win this time. "Do I want it? You bet your ***ing a** I do! I think that people assume that I don't care or don't want it or don't need it or something. It's hard to be there five times and I'm only human, you know? But I don't go home and cry, because we're all grown-ups here."